MONA FOMA – Music and Art Festival Tasmania

MONA FOMA, Tasmania’s annual Festival of Music and Art, is back. We’re fucking excited. You should be too. After having our minds fisted by the gnarly arm of Dark Mofo late last year, we are now slaves to the island beast and its yearly offerings. And the time has come to headily succumb to what, on an embargoed email, reads to be another ball tearing journey to the thumping heart of Hobart. Since its inception in 2009, the five-day, multi-disciplined orgy of art has helped cement Tasmania’s place within Australia’s cultural fabric. Forget apples and biker speed, thanks to David Walsh’s fortress of fantastic, MONA, and the collective mind power of Tasmania’s creative community, Tassie is now all about throwing rad festivals and parties. We actually couldn’t sum the lineup better than the presser itself, so in a nutshell, among this year’s MONA FOMA madness there’ll be “…a dancing robot, a free-styling philosopher, prog-punk space opera, morning meditation, black metal with violins, gender liberationists, ambient electronica, string quartet protest music, a Krautrock pioneer, bluegrass Bach, improvised pipe organ, and the usual Bacchanalian nightclub mayhem of Faux Mo. Oh, and lasers.” Yep. The organised chaos has been orchestrated by Brian Ritchie of Violent Femmes fame, along with MONA senior curators Nicole Durling and Olivier Varenne. It’s all about championing the festival’s “…egalitarian philosophy”, which is basically fancy speak for everyone gets to party as hard as everyone else. The venue for this year’s event will centralise at Macquarie Wharf (MAC1 and MAC2) for the first time and will feature two stages, three orchestra’s, over 200 artists and fuck all sleep. Perfecto. Enough yabbering.

Here’s the lineup. MONA FOMA – JANUARY 15-19

NSGAR WALLENHORST

ASTRONAUTALIS

AUSTRALIAN ART ORCHESTRA with NGAIIRE AUSTRALIAN CHAMBER ORCHESTRA QUARTET